Presidential and vice-presidential
mortality

Personal reflections

These slightly morbid
speculations
were generated over the weekend before the 2000 presidential
election (before
we realised just how dramatic that would end up), mainly by
rereading bits
of Tindall and Shi's America: A Narrative History and
Eugene Roseboom's
A History of Presidential Elections, and reflecting on the
cycles
of history and the obscurity of many of the Vice-Presidents and
Presidents
who have served the US. One of my first ever memories of a
political news
story is the death of Lyndon Johnson. In 1973-74 my family lived
in Massachusetts
for a year, and I remember sneaking down after bedtime to find my
parents
watching the televised confirmation hearings of Gerald Ford as
Vice-President.
I actually celebrated my seventh birthday in Washington on a
family trip.
We saw President Nixon's helicopter leaving the White House,
reputedly
with him inside. Newspaper billboards were full of the word
Watergate which
I understood was an apartment block and also a burglary. When we
went back
to Ireland that summer, Alastair Cooke's radio broadcast Letter
from
America was a focal point of Sunday mornings as the drama of
Nixon's
impeachment accelerated. Finally one day when we were on holiday
in County
Waterford the news came that he had resigned, and that he had wept
afterwards.
I was bemused by the idea that a grown man could cry.

As I grew up, US politics
was always one of those external factors of which I was aware.
Aged nine,
I sympathised with Ford in 1976, because he was the candidate I
had heard
of; aged 13, I was firmly a supporter of Carter in 1980, and a
vicarious
Democrat thereafter - I noticed as a teenager how I never met
any Americans
in Europe who admitted to support for Reagan, who was regarded
by us Europeans
as a figure of fun. Bush's televised vomiting onto the Prime
Minister of
Japan symbolised the bankruptcy of the American ideal. In 1992,
I sat up
with Seth Spiers and another at the top of a student tower block
where
I was a warden at the time, drinking beer and watching Clinton
win. In
1996, I spent the evening drinking beer with Stephen Farry and
Allan Leonard,
watching Clinton win again; it was less exciting, given that
Dole was an
obvious loser, and the most interesting bit of the evening for
me was that
the taxi driver who took me home claimed to be the brother of
the IRA's
Chief of Staff, who had soundly defeated me in an election six
months before.

My second
visit to Washington came about shortly thereafter, when I was
hired by
the National Democratic Institute to work for them in Bosnia and
underwent
my induction at the start of 1997. It was a bitterly cold week,
but the
dais was nonetheless being built in front of the White House for
Clinton's
second inauguration a few days later. The Chair of the
Inauguration
Committee
was in fact a woman I had met through previous NDI involvement,
a
Democratic
activist from Arkansas. I began to realise that once you get
into
politics
it is not a very large world. While I was in the Balkans the
news began
to break of the Starr inquiry and the subsequent impeachment
hearings;
the final trial in the Senate came just after we had moved to
Brussels.
So although I have never been able to participate directly in
American
politics (though my grandmother was an American citizen, and
much later
I discovered that her uncle had been President Taft's
attorney-general)
it has always
been one of my favourite spectator sports.

A final note. Early in
2000,
I spent a week in Hungary training Serbian opposition parties in
how to
win the election that we knew would happen soon. Part of the
'light relief'
in each training session was a screening of the documentary,
"The War Room",
which follows James Carville and George Stephanopoulos through
the 1992
election campaign. At one point, Mary Matalin, being interviewed
about
the Clinton-Bush debate, says something like: "This is not some
kind of
game, where people get out their peanuts and their hot dogs..."
The Serbian
translator had slightly misunderstood. The hot dogs disappeared
from the
sub-titles, and the peanuts were replaced by a word that sounds
similar
but means something quite different. On reflection I felt that
the (incorrect)
analogy of Clinton and Dole comparing the sizes of their
manhoods made
more sense to the average Serb than the (correct) analogy of
junk food
consumption, so while I reported the problem to my sponsors I
recommended
that they let it stay. As far as I know they did.

This page is not about me,
but about American Presidents and Vice-Presidents, and how their
lives
have overlapped in the most literal of senses. How many
ex-Presidents have
ever been alive at the same time? (Five). How many
ex-Vice-Presidents?
(Six). What is the largest number of past, present and future
presidents
who have been alive at the same time? (Eighteen - or nineteen if
you count
Grover Cleveland twice). What about Vice-Presidents? (Twenty).
And who
said that the Vice-Presidency "ain't worth a pitcher of warm
spit"? All
these questions, and more, are answered in quite unnecessary
detail below.

But before the main
business,
these are my favourite Presidential and Vice-Presidential links:

Former Presidents and Vice-Presidents

From 21 January 2001 to 5
June 2004 there were five living
ex-presidents of the USA, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald
Reagan, George
Bush Sr and Bill Clinton, for only the third time in history. The
first
time was during the first few months of Abraham Lincoln's
presidency, between
his inauguration on 4 March 1861 and the death of John Tyler, aged
71,
on 18 January 1862. Tyler had become President on the death of
William
Harrison in April 1841 and served until March 1845. At the time of
his
death he was actually a member of the Confederacy's Congress and
so was
technically a traitor to the country of which he had been
President twenty
years before. Tyler's two immediate successors as President, Polk
and Taylor,
had both died shortly after Taylor's election in 1848, but their
successors,
Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan were still
alive,
aged respectively 60, 56 and 69 at the time of Lincoln's
inauguration,
and indeed all three survived Lincoln. More impressively, Martin
Van Buren,
who had been William Harrison's predecessor as President in
1837-41, was
also still alive aged 79; he died on 24 July 1862.

The second historical
period
in which there were five living ex-Presidents was much more
recent. Between
the end of George Bush Sr's term of office on 20 January 1993
and the death
of Richard Nixon on 22 April 1994, three other ex-Presidents,
Ford, Carter
and Reagan were still alive. This was also incidentally the only
period in history
during which there were six living former Vice-Presidents of the
United
States - Quayle (VP to Bush), Bush (VP to Reagan), Mondale (VP
to Carter),
Ford (VP to Nixon), Agnew (also VP to Nixon) and Nixon (VP to
Eisenhower).
As Agnew died in 1996 it will be some time before this happens
again; the
current total is five (Ford, Mondale, Bush, Quayle and Gore).

There have on the other
hand
been six historical periods when there were no living
ex-presidents of
the United States, and three when there were no living former
Vice-Presidents.
The first in both categories, obviously, was in the period
before the end
of George Washington's term of office on 3 March 1797. The
second period
with no living ex-Presidents followed shortly after, as
Washington died
on 14 December 1799 and his successor, John Adams, remained in
office until
3 March 1801.

After that we look forward
seventy years. From the high water mark of 1861-62 it was all
downhill.
As noted above, Tyler and Van Buren both died in 1862, bringing
the number
of living ex-Presidents down to three; Lincoln's assassination
in 1865
does not change the total; Buchanan died in 1868, and Pierce in
1869, leaving
only Fillmore and Andrew Johnson, both of whom died during
Ulysses Grant's
second term, Fillmore in 1874 and Johnson on 31 July 1875. There
were then
no living ex-Presidents until Grant retired on 3 March 1877.

Hannibal Hamlin, who had
been Abraham Lincoln's first Vice-President (1861-65), died on 4
July 1891,
Independence Day. There were then no living former
Vice-Presidents until
the then incumbent, Levi P. Morton (who served during Benjamin
Harrison's
presidency, 1889-1893) retired on 4 March 1893.

Fifteen years on, Theodore
Roosevelt was in his second term of office having outlived all
his predecessors
as President. He had assumed the higher office on the
assassination of
McKinley in 1901; Benjamin Harrison had died earlier that year,
and Grover
Cleveland, whose terms as President both preceded and followed
Harrison's,
died on 24 June 1908. There was therefore no living ex-President
until
Roosevelt retired on 3 March 1909.

Ten years on, the death of
Levi P. Morton on 16 May 1920 (at 96, the second longest lived
Vice-President)
left no other living ex-Veep until the incumbent Thomas Marshall
retired
on 4 March 1921 (the first Vice-President in almost a century to
serve
two full terms). Both Theodore Roosevelt and his eventual
deputy, Charles
Fairbanks, had died in the previous year; Taft's Vice-President,
James
Sherman, had tactlessly died just before he and Taft lost the
1912 election.
This ten month period in 1920-21 was the last so far in which
there was
no living former Vice-President.

Moving forward again, we
find a two month period between the death of Calvin Coolidge on
5
January
1933 and the end of his successor Herbert Hoover's term of
office on 3
March when again there were no living ex-Presidents. Coolidge of
course
had succeeded Harding on the latter's death in 1923; Woodrow
Wilson had
died shortly after. Taft, who preceded Wilson, had lived until
1930.
Hoover
made up for this by surviving until 1964, making him the second
longest
lived US President to that date. The longest lived was then John
Adams,
but his record was overtaken by Ronald Reagan in October 2001.
Gerald
Ford in turn overtook Reagan in November 2006, but died the
following
month. George Bush senior will need to live to 2017 to overtake
him.

Forty years later we come
to the final (so far) period when no former President lived.
During the
first term of Richard Nixon, Eisenhower died in 1969,
Eisenhower's predecessor
Truman in 1972 and Nixon's predecessor Johnson just after
Nixon's second
inauguration, on 22 January 1973. There were then no living
ex-Presidents
until Nixon brought his own term to a premature close by
resigning on 9
August 1974. As noted above, he and his successors have
displayed greater
longevity than most of his predecessors.

Past, present and future Presidents

The rapid turnover of
presidents
in the second half of the nineteenth century brought about four
distinct
periods between 1822 and 1845 when there were no less than
eighteen former,
current and future US presidents alive, a total that is unlikely
to ever
be repeated. When Rutherford B. Hayes was born on 4 October 1822,
the incumbent
president was James Monroe. Of Monroe's predecessors, only George
Washington
had died; John Adams, then aged 86, and Thomas Jefferson, then 79,
both
lived until 4 July 1826, and Monroe's immediate predecessor James
Madison
was a healthy 64. The fourteen future presidents alive at the time
of Hayes'
birth were John Quincy Adams (then 55), Jackson (also 55), Van
Buren (39),
William Harrison (49), Tyler (32), Polk (26), Taylor (37),
Fillmore (22),
Pierce (17), Buchanan (31), Lincoln (13), Andrew Johnson (13),
Grant (5
months) and Hayes himself.

The next such period was
a decade later; the deaths of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and
James Monroe
were balanced by the births of James Garfield, Chester Arthur
and on 20
August 1833 Benjamin Harrison. There were now two living
ex-presidents:
James Madison was 82 and John Quincy Adams 66, the same age as
incumbent
Andrew Jackson. Of the future presidents other than Benjamin
Harrison,
Van Buren was 50, the new baby's grandfather William Harrison
60, Tyler
43, Polk 37, Taylor 48, Fillmore 33, Pierce 28, Buchanan 42,
Lincoln and
Andrew Johnson both 24, Grant 11, Hayes 10, Garfield 21 months
and Arthur
2 years old.

Madison died aged 85 on 28
June 1836. The birth of Grover Cleveland on 18 March 1837
complicates things
as he served two non-consecutive terms as President, 1885-1889
and 1893-1897.
For present purposes I shall count him only once. At the time of
his birth,
former president John Quincy Adams was 69 and former president
Andrew Jackson
had celebrated his 70th birthday three days before. The
incumbent President,
Martin Van Buren, was a much younger 54. Of his eventual
successors, William
Harrison was 64, Tyler 46, Polk 41, Taylor 52, Fillmore 37,
Pierce 32,
Buchanan 45, Lincoln and Andrew Jackson both 28, Grant and Hayes
both 14,
Garfield 5, Arthur 6 and Benjamin Harrison 3. If we count
Cleveland twice
there were thus nineteen past, present and future Presidents
alive until
the death of William Harrison at the age of 68, a month after
his inauguration,
on 4 April 1841.

That brings the total back
down to seventeen (or eighteen if you count Cleveland twice).
This goes
back up to eighteen (or nineteen) on the birth of William
McKinley on 29
January 1843, at which point former presidents John Quincy Adams
and Jackson
were both 75, former president Van Buren 60, and the incumbent
Tyler 52.
Polk was 47, Taylor 58, Fillmore 43, Pierce 38, Buchanan 51,
Lincoln not
quite 34, Andrew Johnson a month past his 34th birthday, Grant
and Hayes
both 20, Garfield 11, Arthur 12, Cleveland 5, and Benjamin
Harrison 9.
Andrew Jackson's death on 8 June 1845, aged 78, and John Quincy
Adams'
death at his desk in Congress on 23 February 1848, aged 80, mark
an end
to this high point of presidential contemporaneity.

Presidential longevity and term
length

Why do I think this is
unlikely
to be repeated? There are some significant variations over time in
the
life patterns of Presidents. The average age of the 41 Presidents
(whether
or not you count Cleveland twice) when first elected has been 55;
the average
length of their terms just over 5 years; their average age on
leaving office
therefore is 60, and the average age at death (of the 37 who have
died)
is 69. So on that basis we could expect that at an average moment
in history,
you would have one serving President, eleven future presidents and
one
or two former ones hanging around.

The present glut of
ex-Presidents
is partly caused by unusual longevity. But this will not balance
the real difference with the later
nineteenth century, which is that presidents are now serving
longer terms.
The seventeen presidents from William Harrison (1841) to William
McKinley
(1897-1901) served on average 3 years and seven months in office
(3 years
and ten months if you count Cleveland only once). 7 of them
served less
than 4 years in office; only Grant and Cleveland served two full
terms;
Lincoln and McKinley were both assassinated shortly after being
reelected.

However, the eight
presidents
before Harrison had managed an average term of six and a half
years, and
none left office prematurely. And the seventeen presidents since
McKinley
have managed a respectable average of 5 years and ten months in
office,
with the short presidencies of Ford, Kennedy and Harding offset
by Frankin
Roosevelt's massive 12-year term and the double terms of Wilson,
Eisenhower,
Reagan and Clinton. So if the average term of office stays at
five or six
years, we are very unlikely to ever again have the situation of
18 or 19
past, present or future presidents living at the same time,
unless the
average president starts to live into their tenth decade, a
life-span twenty
years longer than the average so far.

The largest tally of past,
present and future Presidents living at any time in the
twentieth century
(as far as we know) began with the birth of Kennedy on 29 May
1917. Theodore
Roosevelt was then aged 58, ex-President Taft 59, and the
incumbent President
Wilson was 60. The future Presidents were Harding (51), Coolidge
(44),
Hoover (42), Franklin Roosevelt (35), Truman (33), Eisenhower
(26), Lyndon
Johnson (8), Nixon (4), Ford (3) and Reagan (6). This makes a
total of
fourteen, which endured until Theodore Roosevelt's death on 6
January 1919.
I think it likely that as those born in the twentieth century
become president
in the twenty-first, this total will certainly be matched again
and possibly
exceeded. George W. Bush was born on July 6, 1946, and Bill
Clinton on
19 August that year; Truman was then President, Hoover was still
living,
and other future presidents included Eisenhower, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon,
Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Senior. If three more future
presidents
turn out to have been born before Kennedy's death in 1963, the
number will
rise to 15.

The Vice-Presidency

The Vice-Presidency has
actually
been vacant for over 36 years in total. Until the passage of the
25th Amendment
to the Constitution in 1967, there was no means of replacing a
Vice-President
who died in office or resigned, or of appointing a new
Vice-President in
the case of the President's death or resignation elevating the
incumbent
to the higher position. (Since then the process of replacement has
been
used twice, in 1973 to appoint Ford and in 1974 to appoint
Rockefeller.)
So the post was left vacant for periods of over three years
following the
deaths of President Harrison in 1841, Vice-President King in 1853,
President
Lincoln in 1865, President Garfield in 1881, Vice-President
Hendricks in
1885, President McKinley in 1901, and President Franklin Roosevelt
in 1945.
Altogether seven Vice-Presidents have died in office (George
Clinton, Gerry,
King, Henry Wilson, Hendricks, Hobart and Sherman), two have
resigned (Calhoun
and Agnew), eight became President as a result of deaths (Tyler,
Fillmore,
Andrew Johnson, Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and
Lyndon
Johnson) and one as a result of Presidential resignation (Ford).

In the nineteenth century
Vice-Presidents tended to find it difficult to secure
re-nomination; in
fact, once the present election system had been set up by the
12th Amendment
in 1804, only two sitting Vice-Presidents in a hundred years
were even
nominated on the same ticket for re-election with their
Presidents - Daniel
Tompkins (VP to Monroe, 1817-1825, who died shortly after
leaving office
just before his 51st birthday - the shortest lived of all VPs)
and R.M.
Johnson, VP to Van Buren, who failed to get all of Van Buren's
electors
to support him in 1837 and had to be elected by the Senate, and
like Van
Buren lost to Harrison and Tyler for re-election in 1841.
Johnson can be
said to be the only Vice-President who failed twice to be
elected by the
electoral college. John Calhoun, elected as John Quincy Adams'
VP in 1825,
fell out with him and was instead elected as Andrew Jackson's
Vice-President
in 1827. He then fell out with Jackson as well and resigned in
order to
become a Senator in December 1832.

In the twentieth century
it has been easier for Veeps. Taft's VP, Sherman, ran with him
for re-election
in 1912 but unfortunately died a few days before the election;
the ticket
that beat them, Woodrow Wilson and Thomas Marshall, was
re-elected in 1916,
as were Roosevelt/Garner in 1936, Eisenhower/Nixon in 1956,
Nixon/Agnew
in 1972, Reagan/Bush in 1984 and Clinton/Gore in 1996; and
sitting Vice-Presidents
were defeated in re-election bids in 1933 (Curtis), 1980
(Mondale), and
1992 (Quayle).

Three VP's were elected
President
at the end of their term of office - Adams, Jefferson (who
defeated Adams),
Van Buren, and Bush - and three were defeated in a Presidential
election
at the end of their term of office - Breckinridge, Nixon, and
Gore. One
was elected President eight years after his term as VP ended
(Nixon). Three
ran as third-party candidates for President after they had been
Vice-President
(two of them had also been President in the meantime - Fillmore,
Theodore
Roosevelt, and Wallace). All three lost.

Past, present and future
Vice-Presidents

There have been two
historical
periods when no less than twenty past, present and future holders
of the
Vice-Presidency were drawing breath. The first began with the
birth of
Charles Curtis (VP to Hoover, 1929-33) on 25 January 1860. The
fifteen
then future Vice-Presidents were Curtis himself, Theodore
Roosevelt (VP
to McKinley, 1901; then aged 13 months), James Sherman (VP to
Taft, 1909-1912;
then aged 4), Thomas Marshall (VP to Wilson, 1913-1921; then aged
5), Charles
Fairbanks (VP to Theodore Roosevelt, 1905-1909; then aged 7),
Garret Hobart
(McKinley's first VP, 1897-1899; then aged 15), Adlai Stevenson
(Cleveland's
second VP, 1893-1897; then aged 24), Chester Arthur (VP to
Garfield, 1881;
then aged 29), Levi Morton (VP to Benjamin Harrison, 1889-1893;
then aged
35), Schuyler Colfax (Grant's first Vice-President; then aged 36),
Thomas
Hendricks (Cleveland's first Vice-President, 1885; then aged 40),
Henry
Wilson (Grant's second Vice-President, then aged 47); William
Wheeler (VP
to Hayes, 1877-1881), Hannibal Hamlin (then aged 50), who became
Vice-President
under Lincoln on 4 March 1861 and served until 1865, and Andrew
Johnson
(then aged 51), Lincoln's second VP in 1865. The incumbent
Vice-President
was the youngest man ever to hold the office, John Breckinridge,
aged 38,
who served under James Buchanan until Lincoln and Hamlin's
inauguration.
Four former Vice-Presidents were still living: these were Millard
Fillmore
(VP to Taylor, 1849-50; then aged 60), George Dallas (VP to Polk,
1845-49;
then aged 67), Martin Van Buren (Andrew Jackson's second VP,
1833-37; then
aged 77), and James Tyler (VP to William Harrison, 1841; then aged
69).

Tyler's death on 18
January
1862, and the subsequent deaths of Van Buren and Dallas, are
off-set by
the births of Charles Dawes (VP to Coolidge, 1925-29; born 27
August 1865),
James Nance Garner (Franklin Roosevelt's first Vice-President,
1933-41;
born 22 November 1868) and finally Calvin Coolidge (VP to
Harding, 1921-23)
on 4 July 1872 to bring the total back up to twenty for the
second (and,
I suspect, last) time until the death of Millard Fillmore on 8
March 1873.

The highest
twentieth-century
tally of living Vice-Presidents, so far, was in the period
immediately
following the birth of Gerald Ford on 14 July 1913, when there
were seventeen
past, present and future presidents alive. Apart from Ford these
were Richard
Nixon (VP to Eisenhower, 1953-1961; then aged 6 months), Hubert
Humphrey
(VP to Lyndon Johnson, 1965-69; then aged 2), Lyndon Johnson (VP
to Kennedy,
1961-63; then aged 4), Nelson Rockefeller (Ford's own
Vice-President, 1974-77;
then just past his 5th birthday), Henry Wallace (Franklin
Roosevelt's second
Vice-President, 1941-45; then aged 24), Harry Truman (Franklin
Roosevelt's
third Vice-President, 1945; then aged 29), Alben Barkley (VP to
Truman,
1949-53; then aged 35), Calvin Coolidge (VP to Harding, 1921-23;
then just
past his 41st birthday), James Nance Garner (Franklin
Roosevelt's first
Vice-President, 1933-41; then aged 44), Charles Dawes (VP to
Coolidge,
1925-29; then aged 47), Charles Curtis (VP to Hoover, 1929-33;
then aged
53), incumbent VP Thomas Marshall (aged 63), and former VPs
Theodore Roosevelt
(McKinley's second VP, 1901; then aged 54), Charles Fairbanks
(VP to Theodore
Roosevelt, then aged 61) Adlai Stevenson (Cleveland's second VP,
then aged
77), and finally Levi P. Morton (VP to Benjamin Harrison, then
aged 87).
Stevenson's death on 14 June 1914 brings this period to a close.
Again,
it is quite possible that this total will be exceeded in the
future. At
the time of Dick Cheney's birth on 30 January 1941, 13 other
past, present
and future holders of the office were alive; the incumbent was
Henry Wallace,
his living predecessors were Charles Dawes and James Nance
Garner (who
had just been dumped as President Roosevelt's running mate), and
the future
living VP's were Truman, Barkley, Nixon, Johnson, Humphrey,
Agnew, Ford,
Rockefeller, Mondale, and Bush. The births of Dan Quayle on 4
February
1947 and Al Gore on 31 March 1948 bring the total to a recent
high of 16
(so far) which endures until the death of Dawes on 23 April
1951.

The 46 Vice-Presidents
have
on average come into office a year younger than the 42
Presidents (aged
54 rather than 55), served shorter terms (just under four years
rather
than just over five), but then tended to live longer afterwards
(13 years
rather than ten) with the average age at death being 71 rather
than 69.
John Adams (1735-1826), who died at the age of 90 years and 8
months, was
the oldest ever President but only the third oldest
Vice-President, being
outlived by both Levi P. Morton (1824-1920) who died on his 96th
birthday,
and James Nance Garner (1868-1967) who died fifteen days before
his 99th
birthday. It was Garner who famously said that the
Vice-Presidency of the
United States "ain't worth a pitcher of warm spit."